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Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert and Schumann songs series for Hyperion are landmarks in the history of recorded music. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Hyperion is delighted to present t ...» More

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson’s latest enterprise traverses the complete songs of Brahms. He is joined here on Volume 2 by the wonderful Christine Schäfer, whose contribution to the Schu ...» More

For this third volume in Hyperion's Brahms Songs cycle, Graham Johnson is joined by the young German tenor Simon Bode in his debut recording for the label. Equally at home in the opera house and the recital hall, Bode's is a voice fusing control a ...» More

Graham Johnson is both mastermind and pianist in this series of Brahms’s complete songs. Volume 4 presents the bass-baritone Robert Holl, famed for his weighty interpretations of this repertoire. Included are all songs of Op 94, as well as the Vie ...» More

Dusk has fallen from on high, All that was near now is distant; But there the evening star appears Shining with its lovely light! All becomes an uncertain blur, The mists creep up the sky; Ever blacker depths of darkness Are mirrored in the silent lake.

Now in the eastern reaches I sense the moon’s light and glow, The branching hair of slender willows Frolics on the nearby water. Through the play of moving shadows, The moon’s magic light quivers down, And coolness steals through the eye Soothingly into the heart.

This is one of the finest of Brahms’s infrequent Goethe settings, all the more remarkable because the extraordinary poem was not taken up by Schubert, Schumann or Wolf. Fanny Hensel set it beautifully in 1843, and Othmar Schoek in 1911. Brahms became acquainted with the poem through the conductor Hermann Levi who had set it himself. This is relatively late Goethe, the eighth of the Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres-und-Tageszeiten written by the poet at the age of 78, and a remarkably beautiful depiction of sunset and moonrise. The intimations of mortality that are also part of the lyric must have seemed somewhat inapplicable to the forty year-old Brahms when he composed his setting, but more than twenty years later, when he came to the closing Andante con moto of his second clarinet sonata (Op 120 No 2), he chose a passage from this song (the melody in bars 13–16 for the words ‘Doch zuerst emporgehoben’) as the theme for that movement’s variations. This does indeed seem a conscious, if discreet, act—if not exactly a leave-taking, then a hint that a departure could soon be in the offing. As in the Heine song Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, Brahms regarded repose and relief from pain (and thus also death) as something soothingly cool—and the end of this poem might have spoken to him in this way.

The opening four bars of introduction, each with two quavers in the bass clef, phrased away leaving a quaver’s rest, suggest something ominous in the lowering cloudscape. There is still a chink of light in the picture but there is distinct musical warning that darkness is spreading like a mist through the music’s texture. After the arrival of the voice this mood accounts for a further 8 bars of the song. There is now a passage of major-key radiance (bars 13–20), an illustration of the rising evening star. Now, first in the right hand, and then in the left, watery semiquavers in the accompaniment represent the spreading of a shroud of mist over the lake (bars 21–32); the music seems to feel its way through the darkness as if uncertain of its own direction. The contrasting passage that has been radiant on the first page at bar 13 is now transposed into a lower tessitura (beginning in bar 33) with the mention of ‘Schwarzvertiefte Finsternisse’. The mirror imagery of the following line of the poem (‘Widerspiegelnd ruht der See’) explains the earlier imitative writing of the accompaniment where the right-hand semiquavers of bar 21 were repeated, as if in canon, by the left hand in bar 25.

At ‘Nun am östlichen Bereiche’ there is a new fragment of melody—a quote from Hermann Levi’s setting that Brahms here incorporates into his own song by way of collegial acknowledgement of the role that Levi had played in leading him to the poem. Mention of moonlight allows the music to settle momentarily into the open brightness of E flat major and, on the word ‘glut’, the singer’s highest sustained note. The image of willows rustling in the waters provides a slightly more capricious vocal line supported by piano syncopations before a change of key-signature at bar 63. This shift into G major betokens the arrival of the moon, and the rest of the song is bathed in the ‘Zauberschein’ of this heavenly body—at mention of that very word the music initiates a modulation into the calm and open vistas of C major—the setting of ‘Sänftigend ins Herz’ being a fine example of Brahmsian repose where the depth of the music and the depth of the lake (those wonderful left-hand chords in tenths at ‘Sänftigend’!) seem gloriously interchangeable. Goethe tells us that a healing coolness steals into the heart through the eyes—into the depths of the heart certainly, but also perhaps into the depths of oblivion. In this setting we might easily imagine that the singer longs to be immersed deep in the nearby waters, something of a Schubertian image from Die schöne Müllerin perhaps, but also a link with the coolness of the lover’s lake-like eyes in Dein blaues Auge hält so still, the eighth and final song in this opus number. If the singer has a voice low enough to take the lower option to a low G for ‘Herz hinein’ immersion seems to be exactly what the composer had in mind. Resolution into the tonic key of G major comes only in the last bar of the postlude—as if the solution to one’s problems, the moment of true quietus and release, can only occur some moments after the voice has sung its last notes in the lowest depths of its register.

Was it deliberate on Brahms’s part to place a Simrock song with this title, Auf dem See, next to Goethe’s Dämmrung senkte sich von oben, when Goethe’s own Auf dem See is one of his most famous poems, and one of Schubert’s most famous Goethe settings (D543)? A version of the Schubert song is also in E major but it is uncertain whether Brahms would have known this as early as 1873. Another coincidence is that both poems, Goethe’s and Simrock’s, relate to holidays in Switzerland: Goethe’s poem was written on Lake Zürich, Karl Simrock’s in Vevey on Lake Geneva—Vevay (sic) is the third in Simrock’s set of twelve poems entitled Schweizerreise 1833. This particular Simrock, brother of Nicolaus who founded the publishing dynasty in Bonn, was the uncle of Fritz Simrock, who was Brahms’s lifelong friend. Simrock’s volume of poetry appeared in 1844 when Brahms was only eleven years old, otherwise one might have imagined that the last verse of this lyric with its reference to Lieder had been written especially for the composer, just as Klaus Groth was later to provide Brahms with individually crafted poems with inbuilt references to his music. Max Friedländer avers that the last two lines of the poem ‘might be taken as the motto of Brahms’s own lyric works’. In any case, these lines very probably played a large part in his decision to set this poem to music.

The accompaniment of Schubert’s Auf dem See might imply energetic rowing on the lake, but Eric Sams is probably right to suggest that Simrock’s boats are surrounded by lapping water—‘riding and swaying at anchor rather than steering a course’. The music suggests that it is the poet-narrator who is energized by the fresh air and the scenery, and the song seems to breathe deep and exultantly—and this despite the fact that the vocal line, in typical Brahms fashion, moves up and down in arpeggios, mostly in crotchets and with never a pause for breath. This is the kind of prosody that drove the composer’s critics to distraction, but it is up to the singer to punctuate and shape, and to make something living and vibrant of the tracts of seemingly rhythmically unvariegated material—disguising the fact that unimportant words like ‘um’ and ‘der’ are allocated two crotchets for the sake of the melody. The music for the first two verses of the poem is identical, and there is a stormy middle strophe that is ideally placed in musical terms for a short outburst of passionate singing followed by an extraordinarily musical rendition of the process of softening and reconciliation described in the poem. The four-bar interlude between verses 3 and 4 is a textbook example of how a composer should reintroduce familiar material in an AABA construction—when the E major music reappears with ‘Spiegelnd sieh die Flut erwidern’ it appears almost triumphantly inevitable. Once again we have an awkward prosody (words like ‘was’ and ‘hat’ dragged out longer than their importance merits), flaws that are smoothed over by the sheer power of Brahms’s melodic invention. In some respects this is all typical of the composer, but it is not quite typical in another—this is one of those songs after which listeners and performers are left feeling under a cloudless sky and glad to be alive.

The poem is admittedly ‘overwrought’ (Eric Sams) but there is something about it that makes Brahms respond in a wonderfully positive and inventive manner. One is reminded of the slightly unwieldy power of Thomas Hardy’s great rain poem, Childhood among the Ferns—words that would seem to defy musical setting, but Gerald Finzi set them anyway, simply because he loved them so much. This is also the case here: Groth was Brahms’s good friend, his part of Germany was also the composer’s native region, their memories of growing up clearly had something in common. The result is a masterpiece, as well as Brahms’s longest single song. The music is better known than many of the the composer’s Lieder because the composer used it, considerably re-tailored and revised, as the basis for the finale of his first Violin Sonata in G major, Op 78. The song is in any case an extended piece of chamber music, bound together with the same kind of motivic ingenuity to be found in Schubert’s extended songs (for example Viola D786) and far more often in instrumental sonatas rather than in Lieder.

The poem is divided into eight quatrains as printed above. (1) We immediately encounter the leitmotif of the entire work, the dotted rhythm in crotchets and quavers, always on a single, repeated note (though that note varies) that seems to tap at the window-pane of memory, or represent the distant call of birdsong (in this particular rhythm the quail perhaps, as in Beethoven and Schubert’s settings of Der Wachtelschlag). The pianist must frequently cross hands, left over right, to play these notes in different registers of the instrument. The rain itself is represented by the rustling quavers that gently, self-effacingly and more or less ceaselessly, pulsate in the middle region of the keyboard. (The comparison that comes to mind is French: the oscillating semiquavers in Debussy’s Verlaine setting Il pleure dans mon cœur.) The vocal melody, incorporating some of the piano’s dotted rhythms is suitably expressive and somewhat mournful. (2) The same melody and accompaniment for the first part of the strophe changes direction and leads the music through the dark blue of the chromatically ripening crops into an ebullient section (3–4) that begins in A major and traverses many keys. The voice’s arpeggiated meslimas are underpinned by playful sextuplets in the piano. The music gambols with all the energy and zest of boyhood. The drops of water mentioned in the text (‘Kalte Tropfen’) are represented by piano-writing in fountain-like cascades of delicate sound. One is tempted to say that this is music suitable for an enthusiastic Ganymede in love with nature, although here he is a North German working-class boy rather than Trojan prince. (5–6) The key-signature changes to 3/2 and the marking is mezza voce. Undoubtedly the hardest part of the song to bring off, this music abandons ceaseless movement in favour of a kind of transfixed and ecstatic contemplation. Here Groth attempts to describe those moments that link memories of childhood, as reinterpreted by the nostalgic adult, with the secret meaning of being alive. Michael Tippett’s remarkable cantata for voice and piano Boyhood’s End explores the same theme. The accompaniment moves in minims and crotchets with occasional horn echoes in the piano’s bass line, as if the boy were standing in the middle of an enchanted forest. The music for (7) is in fact an exact da capo of the music for (1), now repeated with different words that potently mention ‘alten Lieder’ (Brahms was not yet forty but was always inclined to feel older than his actual years). (8) is a modified repeat of what went before (2). The last page of the song is a beautiful coda—mention of innocent childlike awe softens the music into the radiance of F sharp major. There is no change of tempo in this gradual winding-down (those rain-like quavers continue to pulsate in the accompaniment) but the longer note values of the vocal line herald a conclusion both dreamlike and elegiac.

Schubert frequently set the same text more than once, but this Groth text is the only one (at least so far as we know) that Brahms set twice, the first time as Regenlied WoO23 (see above). In returning to it, Brahms could not resist returning to the rain motive of the much longer Regenlied Op 59 No 3 and recycling the music. Accordingly it sounds very much like what it actually is: a short sequel or coda to the preceding number in the Opus. The key is also F sharp minor and the dotted rhythm (dotted crotchet + quaver in an alla breve time-signature) has become almost too familiar. Many performers choose Nachklang as an easier alternative to Regenlied as it offers far fewer challenges, both vocally and pianistically. The poem is also much more straightforward—very much about troubles of the present rather than memories of boyhood. Brahms is far too subtle a composer to present an unvaried repeat of what has gone before and the musical material is worked out somewhat differently. In fact, the composer’s use of the dotted-rhythm motif is even more pervasive and more ingenious with much crossing of hands.

The search for cooling balm to assuage a wounded heart is a familiar and important theme in the songs of Brahms (cf another Groth setting, Dein blaues Auge). Mein wundes Herz verlangt is not one of the better Groth poems, but its appeal to the composer seems to be personal: these words clearly mean something special to him, or there is something in the verbal imagery that moves him to this unusual music. Broken chords are adopted as an apt analogue for a broken heart. This is especially evident in the four-bar prelude which is both rich in chromatic harmony and austere in terms of the solitary broken sixths in the bass clef that seems both punitive and cruelly exposed. This strangely gestural motif is rendered even more perverse and lopsided by sforzati on the fourth quaver of bars 2 and 3, the least expected place for an accent in 4/4.

The words ‘Mein wundes Herz’ are first heard unaccompanied; the wound is open for all to see and hear. As the vocal line continues, ascending the stave on the word ‘verlangt’, the pianist’s left hand plays the vocal melody we have just heard, but in quavers rather than crotchets. It is as if a wound were being dressed, rather too late for comfort, with a self-protective gauze of counterpoint. This did not stick with Hugo Wolf, one of Brahms’s sternest critics, who took this kind of technical display as a sure sign of emotional impotence. Nevertheless, a master craftsman is clearly at work: strands of voice and piano are (almost) fugally entwined and separated, then entwined again in contrary motion or mirror image, but what has a wounded heart to do with canons and imitation in diminution and augmentation? Why is it, as Eric Sams brilliantly puts it, that the heart ‘swells and contracts, in a typical diastole and systole of longing and assuagement, expressed by deliberate artifice, as well as unselfconscious artistry of the highest order’?

The answer is that this is a perfect illustration of an essential Brahmsian paradox: ‘the hurt heart and the contrapuntal brain’ (Sams again) follow one another in strict canon. The composer was heart-injured, seemingly as a child; the infinite extent of his pain and lack of self-esteem on a personal level was counterpointed by hard-won technical mastery in music with which no one else could compete. Self-abasement and professional grandiosity went hand in hand in a famously prickly personality. If he believed he was unlovable for himself, he knew he was revered for his music—the technical resources of which were his refuge, raison d’être and, on occasion, his protective carapace. In building a cupola of technical wizardry around the raw and exposed vocal line of this song, Brahms somehow softens, if not neutralizes, the pain to which words and feelings such as these are attached. Listening to music lightens the heart, but creating it can be a healing process—something Schubert also understood. The modulation into the major key for ‘O lächle fort mit deinem milden Licht!’ has a Schubertian magic, and although the closing words of this poem are in praise of a beloved woman, in this instance they seem addressed to music itself, surely Brahms’s pole and star. His technical mastery, far from being the arid posturing condemned by Wolf, brings him, time and again, into the presence of the Muse who loves him unconditionally. If Mein wundes Herz verlangt were a covert, or even unconscious, An die Musik, it would be one of many instances when Brahms, master of self-concealment, requires us to read between the lines.

This is one of the famous Brahms songs and is performed very often. It is the fifth of Brahms’s eleven settings of Klaus Groth and reminds us of just how much in common poet and composer seem to have had, not only in terms of their North German backgrounds, but in their complicated emotional needs where childhood memory and deliberate obfuscation played a pivotal role. Both Groth and Brahms seem to have experienced emotional pain as something hot and burning—as if an inner wound were in constant need of a soothing poultice. In this poem the pain is assuaged, as if a bad case of sunburn, by submerging body and soul in the cool blue waters of a lake, a metaphor in turn for the blue eyes of the beloved and an image with tentative but clear sexual connotations. The scenario of Groth’s poem is that he has been burnt by one pair of eyes and now chooses to take refuge in a gaze that has the ability to cure rather than wound him (‘Ich sehe mich gesund’). The heat of the first woman’s glance, in contrast, has been unhealthy.

For Brahms the poem, and thus the music, seems to have suggested a rather more circular enmeshment: the gaze of the same beautiful woman could burn and soothe, injure and cure. There were certain revered figures in Brahms’s life (Clara Schumann and Elizabet von Herzogenberg, both women with beautiful eyes) in whose glances he interpreted mixed messages leading to both rapture and pain. These were women who were capable of causing him torment as well as being, in their gentler moments, the source of its cure. His song does nothing to suggest Groth’s switching of allegiances, a change of relationship, a release from addiction; indeed the music seems rooted to the spot and these blue eyes, wonderful yet also formidable, belong to the same person who is both saviour and executioner.

The stately motion initiated by a descending arpeggio for two bars in the accompaniment, followed by a sequence of another two bars, suggests something grand and miraculous, even portentous, as if there is a spell at work. The vocal line in this short and powerful song is an exercise in inevitable descent; it has the telescoped intensity of an incantation. This is largely because the forte dynamic of the music discourages an intimate interpretation; it is as if the woman whose gaze has these healing powers is cast as something of a priestess or enchantress. If this is water music there is nothing here of the friendly, bubbling stream, rather more of the glassy undisturbed surface of a very deep and icy mountain lake. The repeat of the implacable ‘Und wie ein See so kühl’, a descending phrase suggesting total submersion, suggests, to me at least, that Brahms did not entirely go along with the contentment-in-salvation of Groth’s poem. For Brahms this lake is both cooling and cold, just as a glance from those blue eyes can both assuage his pain and icily reject him altogether. There is certainly nothing very cosy about a beautiful Lorelei whose gaze ensures enslavement as well as a lifetime of suffering with no chance of escape. The postlude, exactly the same music as the prelude, suggests the static predicament of a helpless and willing victim.

Johannes Brahms began his compositional life with songs and works for piano, and he would never abandon songwriting, whatever his ambitions in large instrumental forms. ‘Dein blaues Auge’ is one of his many settings of poetry by Klaus Groth, whose family had ties to Brahms’s father’s family and who was famous in his time for verse in plattdeutsch dialect. This poem from Quickborn—Volksleben in plattdeutschen Gedichten Ditmarscher Mundart (1852) is in the voice of a man we might colloquially describe as ‘on the rebound’; burned by one pair of eyes whose scorn/rejection/passion still pains him, he gazes into the limpid, healing eyes of another woman. It is no wonder that Brahms’s persona places the ‘Nachgefühl’, the painful aftermath, briefly in a darker tonal realm or that touches of that darkness are evident elsewhere in the song (including the beginning and end), even as he asserts a new-found peace.